Amazon squeezed a number of new technologies into the Fire, but it seems its biggest innovation may be new uses it found for an old technology: cameras. The Fire doesn’t just take nice photos–it watches you, and what’s around you, to customize what you see and how you interact with the world. The question is whether those capabilities are enough to make the Fire feel like a cutting-edge phone.

I had the chance to spend some time with Amazon’s new phone, which will start shipping July 25. My initial impression is that the Fire–$199 with a two-year AT&T contract–is competitive with many other premium Android phones, but will appeal most to those already loyal to Amazon’s tightly integrated services.

The screen is 4.7-inches, which I think is just about ideal, and more useful than the 4-inch screen on an iPhone. In your hand, the Fire feels solid; with glass on the front and back, it’s less plasticky than a Samsung Galaxy phone. But the downside is that it feels heavier than an iPhone.

I also liked that the earbuds that come with the Fire have flat cables, and the buds stick together magnetically to keep from getting tangled in your pocket.

What you won’t find in Fire is new sensors–or even some that are already available from competitors, including a fingerprint and pulse reader. The sensor arms race, though, seems to be adding questionable utility to other smartphones.

Instead, Amazon put its technological muscle into software that squeezes more utility out of cameras. It built four into the phone’s front to enable its most showy new feature, called “dynamic perspective,” which brings a kind of 3-D effect to your phone’s screen. Those cameras watch you when the phone is on, tracking your head and then moving the images shown on the screen with you.

In person, it’s a little like motion “parallax” on iPhones, but it goes much further. The Fire’s lock-screen images move like your own personal Pixar movie. Large animated app icons on the home screen’s “carousel” turn just enough that they look like they’re following you around.

The value of dynamic perspective will come in how apps and games figure out smart ways to use it. The few I tried were nice, but hardly must-have. You can use it to read an e-book without touching anything as the text scrolls with your eyes. You can peek around a sign on a map, or pull up extra features without tapping the screen.

“Dynamic perspective” (really, Amazon, you couldn’t think of a more clever name?) also takes some getting used to. It didn’t, in my short trial, make me feel woozy, though it occasionally made text look blurry.

In some cases, you have to learn how to command the phone with your head: Turn just a little bit to reveal Yelp reviews on Amazon’s custom-made maps app, and turn your head a lot to open a side panel with other options. So instead of multitouch, we’ll have multitwitch? I’ll be interested to test whether these actions can become natural, or feel awkward in real-world phone situations like walking down the street or riding a train.

Amazon’s other innovation is in how it uses the camera on the back of the phone. An app called Firefly, accessible from a physical button on the side of the phone, recognizes real-world items and adds them to a list so you can remember them, or buy them later. It can spot many different things through the camera: packaged goods, books, albums, TV shows, and even phone numbers and Web addresses on signs, even ones wrapped around poles.

This may be phone’s hottest feature, handy for busy people who can’t be bothered with typing in a search or scanning a QR code. It’s impressive that Amazon may have cracked visual search better than Google.

But as you’ve probably realized, Firefly (and many of the Fire phone’s other features) are really about hooking Amazon customers further into its store and universe of products. After adding an item to your Firefly list, putting it in your Amazon shopping cart is just a click away.

The Fire may have other helpful features that will become evident with use. If Firefly is the phone’s most useful new user experience, it could be a draw for some–Amazon has hundreds of millions of customers, many fiercely loyal. But it probably won’t make Fire a smartphone everyone will be jealous that you own.